How is an ASP.NET MVC application heavily dependent on System.Web assembly?

5
votes

I've read so many articles about OWIN and Katana, and one of the benefits of using OWIN in ASP.NET application is that when building ASP.NET application, i'm inherently bound to IIS due to the heavy dependency on System.Web assembly. In other words, the System.Web assembly by the default run on every request.

Actually, i didn't get how does the System.Web runs on every request, thus consuming the resources and making ASP.NET applications in general lot slower. And how does the Middleware components solve this problem? does they don't depend on System.Web Assembly?

1
asp.netasp.net-mvcowinkatana
System.Web.dll is not bound to IIS, it can run in other host-processes (such as Cassini, circa 2005). Also I feel you're overstating the performance impact of the ASP.NET pipeline. – Dai
@Dai I highly doubt he's overstating the impact of the pipeline. Breaking away from System.Web was a huge change in ASP.NET 5 and was cited for bringing significant performance improvements. – mason
@Dai Can you explain to me the difference between the Server and the host, because iv'e read a lot but still the difference is blurry for me. the host definition is "the process an application and server execute inside of, primarily responsible for application startup." so it's a c# class or method? And how the IIS is a Server and a Host at the same time? – Mostafa Abd El Razek
Hello @MostafaAbdElRazekm your question is really good and if you already knew the answer please write it down cause i have the same question and unfortunately i didn't found answer to it yet. – Marzouk

1 Answers

1
votes

System.Web.dll is more related to the .NET Framework and not with the web server, so you will have it and use it in your ASP.NET application.

However, the newest version of ASP.NET 5 has a lot of architectural changes and one of these is to get rid of the System.Web.dll dependency. Check more about it on this links:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/introducing-asp-net-5

http://docs.asp.net/en/latest/conceptual-overview/aspnet.html